Sixty-four years ago, on the evening of February 13, 1945, an orgy of genocide and barbarism began against a defenseless German city, one of the greatest cultural centers of Northern Europe. Within less than 14 hours, not only was it reduced to flaming ruins, but an estimated one-third of its inhabitants—**possibly as many as half a million**—had perished in what was the worst massacre of all time. As Jewish propaganda again reaches a crescendo in celebrating the Soviet "liberation" of the famous Auschwitz internment center, it is fitting that we consider what an actual holocaust is—one which is not a Hollywood trademark, but rather one in which millions died in the most horrific and excruciating manner: not only in the genocidal rampages of America's Communist ally in Eastern Europe, but also in the systematic, targeted mass murder of German civilians in deliberately created Anglo-American fire storms.

In such places as Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, Kassel, Würzburg, Darmstadt and Pforzheim, among many others—but especially in DRESDEN, victims were roasted alive in an orgy of Allied sadism and fiendishness without equal, which now stands as a symbol of genocide and evil for all time. The following account, taken from the Feb. 1985 issue of the NS Bulletin, tells us what a REAL holocaust is like.

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Toward the end of World War II, as Allied planes rained death and destruction over Germany, the old Saxon city of Dresden lay like an island of tranquility amid desolation. Famous as a cultural center and possessing no military value, Dresden had been spared the terror that descended from the skies over the rest of the country.

In fact, little had been done to provide the ancient city of artists and craftsmen with anti-aircraft defenses. One squadron of planes had been stationed in Dresden for awhile, but the Luftwaffe decided to move the aircraft to another area where they would be of use. A gentlemen's agreement seemed to prevail, designating Dresden as an "open city."

On Shrove Tuesday, February 13, 1945, a flood of refugees fleeing the Red Army 60 miles away had swollen the city's population to well over a million. Each new refugee brought fearful accounts of Soviet atrocities. Little did those refugees retreating from the Red terror imagine that they were about to die in a horror worse than anything Stalin could devise.

Normally, a carnival atmosphere prevailed in Dresden on Shrove Tuesday.

In 1945, however, the outlook was rather dismal. Houses everywhere overflowed with refugees, and thousands were forced to camp out in the streets, shivering in the bitter cold.

THE PEOPLE FELT SAFE

However, the people felt relatively safe; and although the mood was grim, the circus played to a full house that night as thousands came to forget for a moment the horrors of war. Bands of little girls paraded about in carnival dress in an effort to bolster waning spirits. Half-sad smiles greeted the laughing girls, but spirits were lifted.

No one realized that in less than 24 hours those same innocent children would die screaming in Churchill's firestorms. But, of course, no one could know that then. The Russians, to be sure, were savages, but at least the Americans and British were "honorable."

So when those first alarms signaled the start of 14 hours of hell, Dresden's people streamed dutifully into their shelters. But they did so without much enthusiasm, believing the alarms to be false, since their city had never been threatened from the air. Many would never come out alive, for that "great democratic statesman," Winston Churchill—in collusion with that other "great democratic statesman," Franklin Delano Roosevelt—had decided that the city of Dresden was to be obliterated by saturation bombing.

What were Churchill's motives? They appear to have been political, rather than military. Historians unanimously agree that Dresden had no military value. What industry it did have produced only cigarettes and china.

But the Yalta Conference was coming up, in which the Soviets and their Western allies would sit down like ghouls to carve up the shattered corpse of Europe. Churchill wanted a trump card—a devastating "thunderclap of Anglo-American annihilation"—with which to "impress" Stalin.

That card, however, was never played at Yalta, because bad weather delayed the originally scheduled raid. Yet Churchill insisted that the raid be carried out—to "disrupt and confuse" the German civilian population behind the lines.

Dresden's citizens barely had time to reach their shelters. The first bomb fell at 10:09 p.m. The attack lasted 24 minutes, leaving the inner city a raging sea of fire. "Precision saturation bombing" had created the desired firestorm.

A firestorm is caused when hundreds of smaller fires join in one vast conflagration. Huge masses of air are sucked in to feed the inferno, causing an artificial tornado. Those persons unlucky enough to be caught in the rush of wind are hurled down entire streets into the flames. Those who seek refuge underground often suffocate as oxygen is pulled from the air to feed the blaze, or they perish in a blast of white heat—heat intense enough to melt human flesh.

WOMEN AND CHILDREN TARGETED

One eyewitness who survived told of seeing "young women carrying babies running up and down the streets, their dresses and hair on fire, screaming until they fell down, or the collapsing buildings fell on top of them."

There was a three-hour pause between the first and second raids. The lull had been calculated to lure civilians from their shelters into the open again. To escape the flames, thousands of civilians had crowded into the Grosser Garten, a magnificent park nearly one and a half miles square.

The second raid came at 1:22 a.m. with no warning. Twice as many bombers returned with a massive load of incendiary bombs. The second wave was designed to spread the raging firestorm into the Grosser Garten.

It was a complete "success." Within a few minutes a sheet of flame ripped across the grass, uprooting trees and littering the branches of others with everything from bicycles to human limbs. For days afterward, they remained bizarrely strewn about as grim reminders of Allied sadism.

At the start of the second air assault, many were still huddled in tunnels and cellars, waiting for the fires of the first attack to die down. At 1:30 a.m. an ominous rumble reached the ears of the commander of a Labor Service convoy sent into the city on a rescue mission. He described it this way: "The detonation shook the cellar walls. The sound of the explosions mingled with a new, stranger sound which seemed to come closer and closer, the sound of a thundering waterfall; it was the sound of the mighty tornado howling in the inner city."

MELTING HUMAN FLESH

Others hiding below ground died. But they died painlessly—they simply glowed bright orange and blue in the darkness. As the heat intensified, they either disintegrated into ciders or melted into a thick liquid—often three or four feet deep in spots.

Shortly after 10:30 on the morning of February 14, the last raid swept over the city. American bombers pounded the rubble that had been Dresden for a steady 38 minutes. But this attack was not nearly as heavy as the first two.

However, what distinguished this raid was the cold-blooded ruthlessness with which it was carried out. U.S. Mustangs appeared low over the city, strafing anything that moved, including a column of rescue vehicles rushing to the city to evacuate survivors. One assault was aimed at the bands of the Elbe River, where refugees had huddled during the horrible night.

In the last year of the war, Dresden had become a hospital town. During the previous night's massacre, heroic nurses had dragged thousands of crippled patients to the Elbe. The low-flying mustangs machine-gunned those helpless patients, as well as thousands of other old men, women and children who had escaped the city.

When the last plane left the sky, Dresden was a scorched ruin, its blackened streets filled with corpses. The city was spared no horror. A flock of vultures escaped from the zoo, and fattened on the carnage. Rats swarmed over the piles of corpses.

A Swiss citizen described his visit to Dresden two weeks after the raid: "I could see torn-off arms and legs, mutilated torsos and heads which had been wrenched from their bodies and rolled away. In places the corpses were still lying so densely that I had to clear a path through them in order not to tread on arms and legs."

DEATH TOLL STAGGERING

The death toll was staggering. The full extent of the Dresden Holocaust can be more readily grasped if one considers that well over 250,000—possibly as many as half a million—persons died within a 14-hour period, whereas estimates of those who died at Hiroshima range from 90,000 to 140,000 (1).

Allied apologists for the massacre have often "twinned" Dresden with the English city of Coventry. But the 380 killed in Coventry during the entire war cannot begin to compare with over 1,000 times that number who were slaughtered in 14 hours at Dresden. Moreover, Coventry was a munitions center, a legitimate military target. Dresden, on the other hand, produced only china—and cups and saucers can hardly be considered military hardware!

It is interesting to further compare the respective damage to London and Dresden, especially when we recall all the Hollywood schmaltz about the "London blitz." In one night, 1,600 acres of land were destroyed in the Dresden massacre. London escaped with damage to only 600 acres during the entire war.

In one ironic note, Dresden's only conceivable military target—its railroad yards—was ignored by Allied bombers. They were too busy concentrating on helpless old men, women and children.

If there ever was a war crime, then certainly the Dresden Holocaust ranks as the most sordid one of all time. Yet there are no movies made today condemning this fiendish slaugher; nor did any Allied airman—or Sir Winston—sit in the dock at Nuremberg. In fact, the Dresden airmen were actually awarded medals for their role in this mass murder. But, of course, they could not have been tried, because they were "only following orders."

This is not to say that the mountains of corpses left in Dresden were ignored by the Nuremberg Tribunal. In one final irony, the prosecution presented photographs of the Dresden dead as "evidence" of alleged National Socialist atrocities against Jewish concentration-camp inmates!

Churchill, the monster who ordered the Dresden slaugher, was knighted and the rest of his career is history. The cold-blooded sadism of the massacre, however, is brushed aside by his biographers, who still cannot bring themselves to tell how the desire of one madman to "impress" another one led to the mass murder of up to to a half million men, women and children.

To this day, those responsible for this unspeakable act of terrorism and barbarism have never had the decency to apologize to the victims or their families. They have been too busy preparing other acts of terrorism and barbarism.

Never forget! Remember the DRESDEN HOLOCAUST!

Note:

(1) Although it will never be possible to obtain an exact count of the victims, a reasonable estimate can be adduced by taking the number of registered inhabitants of the city, doubling it by a factor of 2+ to account for undocumented refugees in the city at the time, and then extrapolating the number of dead from analogous instances in other German cities subjected to Allied saturation bombing of civilians during World War II, notably Hamburg, Darmstadt, Kassel and Pforzheim, inter alia.

My grandmother would always begin the story of Dresden by describing the clusters of red candle flares dropped by the first bombers, which like hundreds of Christmas trees, lit up the night sky - a sure sign it would be a big air raid. Then came the first wave of hundreds of British bombers that hit a little after 10 p.m. the night of February 13-14, 1945, followed by two more intense bombing raids by the British and Americans over the next 14 hours. History records it as the deadliest air attack of all time, delivering a death toll that exceeded the atomic blasts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In 20 minutes of intense bombing, the city became an inferno. The second bombing raid came three hours after the first and was “intended to catch rescue workers, firefighters and fleeing inhabitants at their fullest exposure.” Altogether, the British dropped nearly 3,000 tons of explosives that shattered roofs, walls, windows, whole buildings, and included hundreds of thousands of phosphorous incendiaries, which were small firebombs that sprinkled unquenchable fire into every crevasse they rolled into, igniting the inferno that turned Dresden into a “hurricane of flames.”

By the time the Americans flew in for the third and last air raid, smoke from the burning city nearly obliterated visibility. One American pilot recollects, “We bombed from 26,000 feet and could barely see the ground because of clouds and long columns of black smoke. Not a single enemy gun was fired at either the American or British bombers.”

The Americans dropped 800 tons of explosives and fire bombs in 11 minutes. Then, according to British historian David Irving in his book, The Destruction of Dresden, American P-51 fighter escorts dived to treetop level and strafed the city's fleeing refugees.

My grandmother described the horrific firestorm that raged like a hurricane and consumed the city. It seemed as if the very air was on fire.

Thousands were killed by bomb blasts, but enormous, untold numbers were incinerated by the firestorm, an artificial tornado with winds of more than 100 miles an hour that “sucked up its victims and debris into its vortex and consumed oxygen with temperatures of 1,000 degrees centigrade.”

Many days later, after the fires had died down, my grandmother walked through the city. What she saw was indescribable in any human language.

But the suffering etched on her face and the depths of anguish reflecting in her eyes as she told the story bore witness to the ultimate horror of man's inhumanity to man and the stark obscenity of war.

Dresden, the capital of Saxony, a centre of art, theatre, music, museums and university life, resplendent with graceful architecture -- a place of beauty with lakes and gardens -- was now completely destroyed. The city burned for seven days and smoldered for weeks.

My grandmother saw the remains of masses of people who had desperately tried to escape the incinerating firestorm by jumping head first into the lakes and ponds. The parts of their bodies that were submerged in the water were still intact, while the parts that protruded above water were charred beyond human recognition. What she witnessed was a hell beyond human imagination; a holocaust of destruction that defies description.

It took more than three months just to bury the dead, with scores of thousands buried in mass graves. Irving wrote, “an air raid had wrecked a target so disastrously that there were not enough able-bodied survivors left to bury the dead.”

Confusion and disorientation were so great from the mass deaths and the terror, that it was months before the real degree of devastation was understood and authorities, fearful of a typhus epidemic, cremated thousands of bodies in hastily erected pyres fueled by straw and wood.

German estimates of the dead ranged up to 220,000, but the completion of identification of the dead was halted by the Russian occupation of Dresden in May.

Elisabeth, who was a young woman of around 20 at the time of the Dresden bombing, has written memoirs for her children in which she describes what happened to her in Dresden. Seeking shelter in the basement of the house she lived in she writes, “Then the detonation of bombs started rocking the earth and in a great panic, everybody came rushing down. The attack lasted about half an hour. Our building and the immediate surrounding area had not been hit. Almost everybody went upstairs, thinking it was over but it was not. The worst was yet to come and when it did, it was pure hell. During the brief reprieve, the basement had filled with people seeking shelter, some of whom were wounded from bomb shrapnel.

“One soldier had a leg torn off. He was accompanied by a medic, who attended to him but he was screaming in pain and there was a lot of blood. There also was a wounded woman, her arm severed just below her shoulder and hanging by a piece of skin. A military medic was looking after her, but the bleeding was severe and the screams very frightening.

“Then the bombing began again. This time there was no pause between detonations and the rocking was so severe, we lost our balance, and were tossed around in the basement like a bunch of ragdolls. At times the basement walls were separated and lifted up.

We could see the flashes of the fiery explosions outside. There were a lot of fire bombs and canisters of phosphorous being dumped everywhere. The phosphorus was a thick liquid that burned upon exposure to air and as it penetrated cracks in buildings, it burned wherever it leaked through. The fumes from it were poisonous. When it came leaking down the basement steps somebody yelled to grab a beer (there was some stored where we were), soak a cloth, a piece of your clothing, and press it over your mouth and nose.

The panic was horrible. Everybody pushed, shoved and clawed to get a bottle.

“I had pulled off my underwear and soaked the cloth with the beer and pressed it over my nose and mouth. The heat in that basement was so severe it only took a few minutes to make that cloth bone dry. I was like a wild animal, protecting my supply of wetness. I don't like to remember that.

“The bombing continued. I tried bracing myself against a wall. That took the skin off my hands -- the wall was so hot. The last I remember of that night is losing my balance, holding onto somebody but falling and taking them too, with them falling on top of me. I felt something crack inside.

While I lay there I had only one thought -- to keep thinking. As long as I know I'm thinking, I am alive, but at some point I lost consciousness.

“The next thing I remember is feeling terribly cold. I then realized I was lying on the ground, looking into the burning trees. It was daylight. There were animals screeching in some of them. Monkeys from the burning zoo. I started moving my legs and arms. It hurt a lot but I could move them.

Feeling the pain told me that I was alive. I guess my movements were noticed by a soldier from the rescue and medical corps.

“The corps had been put into action all over the city and it was they who had opened the basement door from the outside. Taking all the bodies out of the burning building. Now they were looking for signs of life from any of us. I learned later that there had been over a hundred and seventy bodies taken out of that basement and twenty seven came back to life. I was one of them -- miraculously!

“They then attempted to take us out of the burning city to a hospital.

The attempt was a gruesome experience. Not only were the buildings and the trees burning but so was the asphalt on the streets. For hours, the truck had to make a number of detours before getting beyond the chaos.

But before the rescue vehicles could get the wounded to the hospitals, enemy planes bore down on us once more. We were hurriedly pulled off the trucks and placed under them. The planes dived at us with machine guns firing and dropped more fire bombs.

“The memory that has remained so vividly in my mind was seeing and hearing humans trapped, standing in the molten, burning asphalt like living torches, screaming for help which was impossible to give. At the time I was too numb to fully realize the atrocity of this scene but after I was 'safe' in the hospital, the impact of this and everything else threw me into a complete nervous breakdown. I had to be tied to my bed to prevent me from severely hurting myself physically. There I screamed for hours and hours behind a closed door while a nurse stayed at my bedside.

“I am amazed at how vivid all of this remains in my memory. (Elizabeth is in her late 70s at the time of this writing). It is like opening a floodgate.

This horror stayed with me in my dreams for many years. I am grateful that I no longer have a feeling of fury and rage about any of these experiences any more -- just great compassion for everybody's pain, including my own.

“The Dresden experience has stayed with me very vividly through my entire life. The media later released that the number of people who died during the bombing was estimated in excess of two hundred and fifty thousand -- over a quarter of a million people. This was due to all the refugees who came fleeing from the Russians, and Dresden's reputation as a safe city. There were no air raid shelters there because of the Red Cross agreement.

“What happened with all the dead bodies? Most were left buried in the rubble. I think Dresden became one mass grave. It was not possible for the majority of these bodies to be identified. And therefore next of kin were never notified. Countless families were left with mothers, fathers, wives, children and siblings unaccounted for to this day.” [end quote]

According to some historians, the question of who ordered the attack and why, has never been answered. To this day, no one has shed light on these two critical questions. Some think the answers may lie in unpublished papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Winston Churchill and perhaps others. History reports that the British and American attack on Dresden left more than 2-1/2 times as many civilians dead as Britain suffered in all of World War II, and that one in every 5 Germans killed in the war died in the Dresden holocaust.

Some say the motive was to deliver the final blow to the German spirit -- that the psychological impact of the utter destruction of the heart centre of German history and culture would bring Germany to its knees once and for all.

Some say it was to test new weapons of mass destruction, the phosphorous incendiary bomb technology. Undoubtedly the need for control and power was at the root. The insatiable need of the dominators to exert control and power over a captive and fearful humanity is what drives acts of mass murder like the Dresden firebombing and Hiroshima.

I think there was also an additional hidden and cynical motive which may be why full disclosure of the Dresden bombing has been suppressed. The Allies knew full well that hundreds of thousands of refugees had migrated to Dresden in the belief that this was a safe destination and the Red Cross had been assured Dresden was not a target. The end of the war was clearly in sight at that point in time and an enormous mass of displaced humanity would have to be dealt with. What to do with all these people once the war ended? What better solution than the final solution? Why not kill three birds with one stone? By incinerating the city, along with a large percentage of its residents and refugees, the effectiveness of their new firebombs was successfully demonstrated. Awe and terror was struck in the German people, thereby accelerating the end of the war. And finally, the Dresden firebombing ensured the substantial reduction of a massive sea of unwanted humanity, thereby greatly lessening the looming burden and problem of postwar resettlement and restructuring.

We may never know what was in the psyche of those in power or all the motives that unleashed such horrific destruction of civilian life - the mass murder of a defenseless humanity who constituted no military threat whatsoever and whose only crime was to try to find relief and shelter from the ravages of war. Without the existence of any military justification for such an onslaught on helpless people, the Dresden firebombing can only be viewed as a hideous crime against humanity, waiting silently and invisibly for justice, for resolution and for healing in the collective psyches of the victims and the perpetrators.

Dresden isn't the only place this happened. In a break from their typical "precision" bombing that the US claimed it practiced, in a single raid against Tokyo, the US dropped some one million pounds of incendiary bombs on the city.

Though Tokyo was, at the time, largely a civilian population, the US justified the attack by saying that it would "shorten" the war. Even though six months later they still dropped the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

300 B29 bombers hit the city, and by the time it was done, some 250,000 to 500,000 people lay dead. The exact numbers are unknown to this date because it is said to have gotten so hot on the ground to melt the glass in windows and crystalize concrete. That's more than hot enough to cremate a person.

The total area burned to the ground in this one single raid, would cover an area about the size of greater Manhattan.

After the "Success" of that raid, and the one in Dresden, the US would go on to continue a series of further raids that targeted smaller cities and even villages. There are numerous stories of whole towns just wiped off the map by this tactic, but that's not something that schools like to talk about. It's the US's dirty little secret, or as I've come to call Dresden and Tokyo, the Great American Holocaust.

Is it no wonder that US GI's were hated by the Japanese?

Maybe, in some ways they were right. The Japanese that is. They called the US Military uncivilized barbarians...and in that one raid (and the subsequent ones after it) we sure lived up to that.

Dresden isn't the only place this happened. In a break from their typical "precision" bombing that the US claimed it practiced, in a single raid against Tokyo, the US dropped some one million pounds of incendiary bombs on the city.

Though Tokyo was, at the time, largely a civilian population, the US justified the attack by saying that it would "shorten" the war. Even though six months later they still dropped the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

300 B29 bombers hit the city, and by the time it was done, some 250,000 to 500,000 people lay dead. The exact numbers are unknown to this date because it is said to have gotten so hot on the ground to melt the glass in windows and crystalize concrete. That's more than hot enough to cremate a person.

The total area burned to the ground in this one single raid, would cover an area about the size of greater Manhattan.

After the "Success" of that raid, and the one in Dresden, the US would go on to continue a series of further raids that targeted smaller cities and even villages. There are numerous stories of whole towns just wiped off the map by this tactic, but that's not something that schools like to talk about. It's the US's dirty little secret, or as I've come to call Dresden and Tokyo, the Great American Holocaust.

Is it no wonder that US GI's were hated by the Japanese?

Maybe, in some ways they were right. The Japanese that is. They called the US Military uncivilized barbarians...and in that one raid (and the subsequent ones after it) we sure lived up to that.

I'm glad you brought up Tokyo. That's one atrocity where the court historians, for the most part, don't try and fudge the numbers.

The death toll at Dresden however, is the subject of much controversy. The only reason I can think of is they don't want the victims to become martyrs for National Socialism.

I cry for Dresden! How could my country think that this was a patriotic act? I am so ashamed!

__________________

Proud Spaniard (Visigoth) Italian (Ostrogoth)

No intelligent American is afraid of the "radical Islamic terrorist" threat, the real threat is from a certain ethnic tribe who's only loyalty is Israel and have managed to insert themselves in all the power corridors of our nation to further the interests of the tribe at the cost of our national security.The same tribe makes it a priority to buy up all media outlets in the countries who naively welcome them, we see the same pattern in Britain, Germany and France. They buy up media and set up ethnic lobbies to further the interests of their tribal homeland,while creating a media driven threat and hate of the enemies of their tribal homeland.

It is Dresden annual commemoration day. I assume you are from the UK and want to divert from Dresden to Tokyo, that's understandable.
The rivalry here is "who is the worst war-criminal", the USAF or the RAF.
The attempts from the UK to talk down the Dresden losses below the 85.000 of Tokyo is very transparent. As long as Dresden is on top, the UK is "Gold Medal winner", followed by the USA with "Silver" and "Bronze".
The talking down (with jewish media aid) of the Dresden atrocity would result that "Gold-" and "Silver-medal" winner would be the USAF, while the RAF would slip down to "Bronze". Why do i want to frame England?
They started the war and because of this:

England is impudent enough to build a memorials for war criminals Bomber Harris and Winston Chuchill. Do the United States build statues for FDR or Henry Morgenthau. No, they don't.

The victim statistic makes it clear: 80% females, 25% of the total under 16 years of age. Of course !
Why? Anyone (males) between 14-60 had been drafted into Wehrmacht and Volkssturm, the Soviet spearheads were only 30 miles east of the city.

And then certain members from a certain island here on SF get angry when i MCP3 side with the "Nazis" and present their view, pointing on Bomber Harris and Winston Churchill as war-criminals.

The Myth of the Good War: America in World War II60 Years Ago, February 13-14, 1945: Why was Dresden Destroyed

By Jacques R. Pauwels

Global Research, February 9, 2010

In the night of February 13-14, 1945, the ancient and beautiful capital of Saxony, Dresden, was attacked three times, twice by the RAF and once by the USAAF, the United States Army Air Force, in an operation involving well over 1,000 bombers. The consequences were catastrophic, as the historical city centre was incinerated and between 25,000 and 40,000 people lost their lives.[1] Dresden was not an important industrial or military centre and therefore not a target worthy of the considerable and unusual common American and British effort involved in the raid. The city was not attacked as retribution for earlier German bombing raids on cities such as Rotterdam and Coventry, either. In revenge for the destruction of these cities, bombed ruthlessly by the Luftwaffe in 1940, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and countless other German towns big and small had already paid dearly in 1942, 1943, and 1944. Furthermore, by the beginning of 1945, the Allied commanders knew perfectly well that even the most ferocious bombing raid would not succeed in “terrorizing [the Germans] into submission,”[2] so that it is not realistic to ascribe this motive to the planners of the operation. The bombing of Dresden, then, seems to have been a senseless slaughter, and looms as an even more terrible undertaking than the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is at least supposed to have led to the capitulation of Japan.

I remember watching a documentary on the bombing of Dresden once, many years ago. In it, this one pilot who was running assessment (flies over after the bombers and photographs the damage to see how effective the bombing was) told how hard it was to hold altitude above the city. He said that the heat from the fires were so strong that it actually caused his plane to RISE on the currents.

As if that's not enough, when the plane returned to base after the assessment runs (I think he made three or so) all the paint on the underside of the bomber had been burned away to just the bare metal. Bakelite (early plastic) parts in the plane had also melted from the heat.

While looking for the exact temperatures in Dresden, I found this interesting quote from a Jew who actually survived the bombing and later wrote in his diary of the night. I think it's a very fitting description of what happened, and just how far the Allies were willing to go down a very dark path to end the war.

"...on the evening of this 13 February the catastrophe overtook Dresden: the bombs fell, the houses collapsed, the phosphorus flowed, the burning beams crashed on to the heads of Aryans and non-Aryans alike and Jew and Christian met death in the same firestorm..."

There was no excuse for Dresden, Tokyo, or any of the other cities that were bombed with abandon. Yet history seems to try to tell us that the ends justified the means.